Monday, November 01, 2004

Earlier we had reported that the new Panasonic UJ-830 laptop DVD burner was available, but incorrectly suggested that it would find itself in new Macs. While it is true it can be used in laptops, it is not a slot-load drive as was reported. It is a tray load slimline drive, and Apple no longer uses tray load slimline drives at all. The iMac G5, the iBook, and the PowerBook all now use slot-load slimline optical drives.

Panasonic/Matsushita has now officially announced the slot-load version of this drive, and following the same naming conventions they have used in the past for their slimline slot-load drives, they call it the UJ-835. Other than the loading mechanism, the drive has the same specifications as the UJ-830:

Expect to see this drive in the next iteration of the iMac G5 desktops, and also likely in the next revision of the PowerBooks and iBooks as well. Although a nice bonus for laptops, it is more important to see 8X DVD-R burning for the iMac G5. The 4X DVD-R burner in the current iMac is slow by desktop standards, and 8X DVD-R media is now becoming affordable. The one feature the iMac G5 will still lack, however, is the ability to burn dual-layer discs. The Panasonic slimline DVD burners do not support this feature. This is not a huge issue in practical terms for most people however, as good quality dual-layer media will be very expensive for quite some time to come. It is also possible that Apple will ship the drive with a firmware that removes DVD-RAM support, as Apple has done this in the past for unknown reasons.

For additional information on the various DVD recordable formats, please check out my DVD Recordable FAQ.